Concept
Talking-as-dreaming
Thomas Ogden's term, from 2007, for a kind of conversation between analyst and patient that seems unanalytic on its surface, ranging loosely over books, films, food or the weather, but in which the two are in fact dreaming together. Ogden suggested it often comes about when a patient has been unable to dream, and that it can let the patient begin to dream experience that had been undreamable. On this view the analyst need not steer such talk back to the patient's 'real' material, since the talk is itself a form of the analytic work.
Development
2007
introduced by Thomas H. Ogden
In On Talking-as-Dreaming (2007);Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting (2009)
Relations
- 2007 derives from Reverie
Talking-as-dreaming carries the loose, associative quality of the analyst's reverie into the spoken exchange between analyst and patient.
Works
- 2007
Ogden describes a form of waking dreaming for patients who cannot dream in the analytic session, whether through free association or otherwise. In what he calls talking-as-dreaming, analyst and patient engage in loosely structured conversation, often marked by primary-process thinking and apparent non sequiturs, about matters such as books, films, the origins of words, baseball, the taste of chocolate or the structure of light. Such talk may seem unanalytic, but it can allow the patient to begin dreaming experience that was previously undreamable; in an analysis that is a going concern, the talk moves unobtrusively into and out of talk about dreams. Two detailed clinical accounts are given: in one, a patient for the first time dreamed her own, and in a sense her father's, previously unthinkable experience; in the other, a patient who had felt invisible began to dream himself into existence. Ogden sets out three cautions: the difference between the analyst's and the patient's roles must remain continuously felt, the therapeutic aims must be kept firmly in mind, and the patient must dream himself into existence rather than be dreamt up by the analyst.
- 2009
Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting
A collection of essays published by Routledge in 2009 in its New Library of Psychoanalysis. Its central idea is that an analyst can develop a style of their own, a living way of practising that grows largely out of their personality and experience, by attending to their own idiosyncratic ways of thinking, feeling and responding to patients. Thomas Ogden approaches this from four vantage points: those of clinician, supervisor, teacher and reader of psychoanalysis. He begins with the creation of psychoanalysis afresh in the session through talking-as-dreaming, then turns to supervising and teaching psychoanalysis in a way unique to each supervisee and each seminar group. The book continues his close readings of seminal analytic works, extending the work of Bion, Loewald and Searles. Its chapters address Bion's clinical seminars and his four principles of mental functioning, a reconception of the Oedipus complex, and the writing of Harold Searles.
See also
People
References
- On Talking-as-Dreaming2007Evidence for a relation
- Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting2009Evidence for a relation